A hot-metal “bottle car,” one of three in an Erie train that included eight hopper cars as spacers, passes DeForest Junction, between Youngstown and Warren, Ohio, in 1966. Clifford A. Redanz One of the more interesting aspects of steel-mill railroading were the “hot-metal runs” that moved molten iron from the blast furnaces to the open […]
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Toronto, Hamilton & Buffalo’s two ex-NYC J-1e’s were among the Hudsons that captivated a Buffalo boy in the late 1940s. Frank Clodfelter While growing up in Cleveland and Buffalo after World War II, a close encounter with a Hudson-type locomotive was just a train ride away. My first memory was as a four-year-old. My family […]
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The Burlington ‘Zephyr’ as seen in Aurora, Ill., on May 26, 1934. Its nonstop run may have included slow spots. CB&Q Q In 1934, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy ran the Zephyr from Denver to Chicago nonstop. How did they do this without changing crews? Did they have crews on-board for each subdivision and change […]
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Erie RS2 904 clatters into the Lackawanna’s Hoboken Terminal with a Main Line local in 1956. Richard H. Young Youth is wasted on young people, so the saying goes. Kids don’t have the … well … maturity to know what’s special in their world. Watch the crowds at Disneyland. It’s the adults who are agog […]
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Three Pennsylvania Railroad self-propelled motor cars (“doodlebugs”) layover near Penn Station, Baltimore, in May 1955. The cars worked commuter runs on the old Northern Central to New Freedom, Pa. Classic Trains coll. […]
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A set of Pennsylvania Railroad GP9s climbs the east slope of Allegheny Mountain with piggyback train TT1 in September 1956. Trains magazine Editor David P. Morgan, researching a story on PRR’s Altoona–Pittsburgh operations, rides the cab of the second unit. Philip R. Hastings photo […]
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New York Central F7 1678 leads westbound freight Advance LS-7 past BE Tower at Berea, Ohio, in 1957. Richard J. Cook photo […]
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Three FT diesels bring eastbound freight BH-2 past the Lackawanna Railroad’s station at Lake Hopatcong, N.J., in May 1946. Theo. A. Gay photo […]
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On June 15, 1972 — six years before author Olson’s ride on it — Illinois Central Gulf SD40 6000 pulls into Markham Yard at Homewood, Ill., with GP40 3011. J. David Ingles I have always had a thing for “class units,” that is, the first in a series, and “my engine” is Illinois Central 6000, […]
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It was an act of sheer audacity that made Baltimore the cradle of American railroading. Baltimore’s topography of hills broken by short, steep valleys was exactly wrong for a canal, and the city’s outlet to the west, the National Road, was expensive and slow. So city leaders proposed a railroad, the Baltimore & Ohio, to […]
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